Nicodemites. Faith and concealment between Italy and Tudor England. By M. Anne Overell. (St Andrews Studies in Reformation History.) Pp. xiv + 280. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2019. €125. 978 90 04 33166 2; 2468 4317

the faithful of the sixteenth century’. Studies of radicalism have flourished in the years between this and the earlier bibliography. That topic finds its place here as a section within ‘Theological and Intellectual Currents’. More could be made, however, of important modern research, which views radicalism as a state of mind, psychological as much as cerebral or intellectual. Good bibliographies are built on discerning choices about categories and where people fit. Albertoni has Reginald Pole simply as part of ‘Men and Women’, and not forced under dated titles like ‘counter-reformation’ or the once-favoured ‘catholic reformation’. He might have been allowed at least one foot in ‘Nicodemism’ – but that’s another story. Two very long lists represent outstanding modern contributions; first, without doubt, is that ofMassimo Firpo and his collaborators and second, that of the talented American researcher Thomas Mayer, who died whilst this work was in preparation. Pole, ‘the missing pope’, was an Italianate Englishman and it is encouraging to find many studies here which set him in the European world where he belonged. That greater Europe was also the backdrop for the courageous humanist, Olimpia Morata, who moved as a refugee from the Ferrara court to Bavaria, and then to Heidelberg. The excellent modern Morata studies listed here, many of them in article form, signal the turn towards the influence of women and towards the vital role of humanists in Italy’s reform. The editor contextualises Il beneficio di Cristo within a section called ‘Evangelism, Valdesianism’. Thus he avoids setting that contested ‘libriccino’ in a special lonely eminence, as often happens, and as Tedeschi and Lattis did. In Albertoni’s work, Il beneficio is encountered at the crossroads of theology and history, Catholicism and Protestantism, no longer the exceptional text of Italian reform, but derivative, disorganised and inconsistent like most other religious works of the period. Vincenzo Lavenia’s historiographical introduction sets the scene perfectly: his own sympathies are clear, but so is his rare understanding as he probes the kaleidoscopic debates of the last two decades, about Italian reform, the recurring religious crises and ‘the post-Cantimori shift’. His words on the complex effects of ‘the global turn’ (pp. –) deserve application to reformation studies everywhere. At times, both Albertoni and Lavenia could have interspersed their comments with more caution about definition, especially of the ‘isms’ – Evangelism, Valdesianism, Radicalism, Waldensianism and Nicodemism: all these appear in the contents list and frequently thereafter. In an English language volume such tortuous words are likely to prompt fretful mutterings about examining terms. These are largely cultural and linguistic matters; they count for little beside the scholarship, wisdom and sheer enthusiasm that created such a challenging volume.